Friend of Caltech Makes Landmark Gift to Build a Better World

“You ought to leave the world better than you found it,” engineer Allen Davis was known to say. And he did: Davis, who passed away at age 91 in 2015, left more than $60 million from his estate to Caltech.

Aiming to advance science and education for the benefit of humankind, Davis (pictured above with his wife, Lenabelle) directed his bequest to support endowed chairs for faculty, a top priority in Break Through: The Caltech Campaign. To date, Caltech has drawn on Davis’s gift to create four leadership chairs and one professorial chair.

“Allen Davis understood deeply that talented individuals empowered by unfettered resources can change the world for the better,” says Caltech president Thomas F. Rosenbaum, holder of the Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and professor of physics. “His generosity permits scholars from across the disciplines to explore, discover, and invent, propelling forward the Caltech mission.”

Grateful Chair Holders Look to the Future

“Understanding the brain is one of the great frontiers in all of science. How does this biological organ in our skull literally create the world that we experience every waking moment? When I was a Caltech student in the ’80s, we had no Caltech Brain Imaging Center (CBIC) at all. Now we have state-of-the-art MRI scanners that Caltech teams use to tackle topics ranging from memory, perception, and decision-making to autism, depression, and schizophrenia. The Davis Leadership Chair comes at a particularly exciting time, leveraging the CBIC as a core resource for investigating the brain under the new Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech. I am deeply grateful for this support, which will have a very broad impact.”

“Before I came to campus 32 years ago, when I thought of Caltech, I had two heroes in mind: George Ellery Hale and Fritz Zwicky. Hale founded Caltech in great part to find an intellectual home for the Palomar 200-inch telescope. I feel extremely honored to be the inaugural holder of the George Ellery Hale Professorship. In addition, I am very happy that, as director of the Caltech Optical Observatories, I have the opportunity to name my recent project at Palomar, which aims to mine the variable and transient optical sky, as the Zwicky Transient Facility. It is very satisfying to feel so connected with these heroes of mine.”

Shri Kulkarni, George Ellery Hale Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science (The Hale Professorship, named in honor of a Caltech co-founder, was created, like the Davis leadership chairs, with support from Davis's bequest.)

“The Center for Environmental Microbial Interactions (CEMI) is a grassroots institute, born of and sustained by synergies between different groups on campus with an interest in microbes. What makes microbes so remarkable is that they affect literally everything—from human health to the composition of our environment—as they have for billions of years. Today, chemists and bioengineers look to microbes for inspiration when designing new control systems or ways to manufacture useful products. Because of the enormous reach of the microbial world, many individuals in a variety of Caltech divisions have contributed to and benefited from CEMI since its inception in 2012, and we are thrilled that we will soon be able to rely on endowed support to continue and expand our programs.”

“In quantum science and technology at Caltech, we focus on ideas that will have a transformative impact if we succeed. We are trying to do really, really hard things. The Davis Leadership Chair will allow Caltech to sustain its IQIM scholars program, which has powered us scientifically. We recruit fantastic people—ambitious, diverse, and excellent postdoctoral scholars with the breadth to link different parts of our community. In part because of them, what we accomplish is different from anything done elsewhere.”

“I so much appreciate the legacy of Allen Davis in supporting this chair. It helps provide long-term funding for the Keck Institute for Space Studies. This is an enabling act for the Keck Institute, the primary objective of which is to create the environment for creative thinking for the participants in our programs. We bring together a diverse group of people—often strangers in very different fields—so they can develop, and then own, a groundbreaking idea in space science and engineering. We’ve seen the Keck Institute change people’s research directions and their careers. Thanks to Allen Davis, we can count on a long future that makes a lasting impact on the lives of countless scientists and engineers.”

Davis’s bequest was not his first contribution to improving the world. Air and space travel are safer today because of him. He founded companies that make sensors and switches that airlines, the military, and NASA use to manage fuel, oil, coolant, and hydraulic brakes and landing gear.

But Davis felt driven to do more. In 1977, his friend Ben Earl (BS ’44), a civil engineering graduate and builder who met Davis in a networking group for CEOs, invited him to join the Caltech Associates.

As a member of that group, Davis found a lasting opportunity to benefit humanity that enriched his life for decades. Since its founding in 1926, the Associates has gathered passionate learners—the majority of whom are not alumni—who support science, engineering, and education at Caltech.

Attending Associates and other campus events over the years, Davis and his wife, Lenabelle, who died in 2008, learned directly from faculty and students about discoveries coming out of Caltech, just miles from their La Cañada home.

Whenever the couple saw an opportunity to help that matched their interests, they jumped on it. During their lives, they funded research into neuroscience and geology, supported what were then new methods of testing economic theories in the lab, and endowed two professorships at Caltech.

The endowed professorships that Davis established during his life and through his bequest ensure that generations of scholars will have the support and freedom to develop and realize ideas that can make a difference in the world, as he himself advocated.

The leadership chairs his gift funded are an even more distinctive and powerful tool. Rather than providing salary and research support to benefit an individual scholar, these endowments generate discretionary funds that Caltech leaders can use to stimulate creativity, nurture nascent ideas, and respond to unforeseen opportunities throughout the area they direct.

Davis Inspired Professors He Knew

Professor Emeritus John Ledyard, who was the Allen and Lenabelle Davis Professor of Economics and Social Sciences from 2002 to 2016, remembers how a lunch with Davis (pictured left) changed his outlook. “He asked me what research I was working on. After I explained to him what mechanism design theory was and the deep questions I was trying to answer, he looked at me and said, ‘Why don’t you work on something really important, like solving world hunger?’

“At the time, I did not really take it very seriously since I thought I was working on something really important. But later it nagged at me—why not? Soon after, I was given an opportunity to work on the science behind economic approaches to reducing overfishing around the world. Thinking of Allen’s prodding, I jumped at the chance.”

Mary Kennedy, Caltech’s Allen and Lenabelle Davis Professor of Biology since 2002, recalls when Allen Davis came, unannounced, to a talk she gave about the biochemistry that helps our brains encode memories. The next day, he called her to ask if she needed anything for her lab. “I was thrilled and told him that we had been trying to raise money to purchase a particular instrument to use in a new series of studies. He arranged to buy us the instrument directly from the company!”